Ed and David Miliband pay tribute to mother as ‘a force field of life and love’
Marion Kozak, Holocaust survivor, left-wing campaigner and mother of Ed and David Miliband, has died aged 91.
Her sons announced her death Saturday, paying tribute to the “much-loved mother, grandmother and sister” and the “force field of life and love.” They noted that his life followed a “remarkable course.”
“He lived an extraordinary life with a spirit of extreme kindness, warmth and generosity,” they said. “We will miss him greatly, but we will always carry his spirit and values with us.”
She was born Dobra Jenta Kozak in Poland in 1934. She escaped from the Czestochowa Ghetto with her mother and sister during the Nazi occupation in 1942.
He was sheltered by nuns and then by his aunt’s neighbor in Warsaw, and survived the war thanks to what his son Ed told a 2012 Labor Party conference was the “kindness of strangers”.
David Miliband, who made an official visit to Poland in 2009 while he was foreign secretary, paid tribute to those who protected his mother, saying her mother’s life was “saved by those who risked their own lives to protect her from Nazi oppression.”
After the war, Ms Kozak settled in the UK, married left-wing academic Ralph Miliband and became a human rights campaigner and early activist in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
In his 2012 conference speech, his third as Labor leader, Ed Miliband said his mother “probably disagreed with me” but was “like most mothers too kind to say so”.
However, in the same speech he made a connection between her flight from the Nazis and his own political philosophy.
“I believe that we cannot shrug our shoulders in the face of injustice and say that’s the way the world is. And I believe that if we come together as people, we can overcome any challenge.”
“This is how my mother survived the war. The kindness of strangers. The nuns from a convent who took her in and protected her from the Nazis took in a Jewish girl, risking themselves.”
